Conventional methods of finding needed information have been mainly through search engines for unstructured data, and database queries for structured data. A problem with these conventional methods is that the user needs to know how to formulate a good query. Common search engines require the user to come up with pertinent keywords, and the engine can often return a long list of results that the user needs to sift through.
However, there are often times when the user may not know what exact keywords to use to search for the information they are looking for, or does not know or does not remember what exact keywords are contained in documents that the user wants to search for. In such cases, finding the needed information can be difficult and time-consuming.